


A Small Group Of Questionable Morals

by Bianna



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassins, Blood, Burning Bodies, Gen, Not Beta Read, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), They are not really sulking in space but on a planet?, a goat, and now those two are sulking around in space, everyone died, general sadness, this is supposed to be a weird team up story, unnecessary depiction of violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 20:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17884535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bianna/pseuds/Bianna
Summary: Thanos plan did not fail, no hero stepped in to save the day and no one bothered to clean away the corpses. People died and it got worse, much worse, before it got better. But you already know that. So forget the disaster and focus on the mess that occurred right after it, the questionable alliances and plans that occured after everything came clashing down.





	A Small Group Of Questionable Morals

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno, this is a thing...  
> (I switch tenses at some point, sorry)

When Thanos snapped his finger and whished half the universe to ashes, he created something more valuable than the resources he longed to save: opportunity.  
But because it is a truism that catastrophes happen in waves and that those not quite wealthy enough to afford saving carry the brunt of all these, it should be of no surprise that it would be long before this precious gift could be relished. When the chaos finally died down to a universe depopulated, filled with ashes and bodies, previously bustling cities emptied, thriving fields left to overgrowth, its remaining people did what every civilisation had done after times of crisis have passed. Slowly and uncertainly, more or less successful, they rose to a world ripe for taking, ready to be repopulated, reanimated. Because what Thanos had created was shift, shift in the value of life that is, in that of expertise and labour, creating flexibility amongst those that had none before, creating change.  
Who returned from fear and grief, from hunger and lack to the world of the living, found a universe in crisis, yes, but one that could be pulled out of the figurative and literal ashes it had been covered in and to be remade to the picture of its new creators. 

It was to this time that a spaceship landed in the formally bustling city of Uaster near the harbour towers. The ship was well used, well loved, in some parts of the galaxy even well known. It had scratches and dents, the damage done to the outer hull speaking of a crew hungry for fight, and a sloppily applied yellow paintjob, that did not cover the damage, but showed care for what had once been a home. All this however was unimportant, as the crew had disintegrated, quite literally. Left was only their enemy, a cyborg woman known for her liberal philosophies regarding the use of deadly force when faced with obstacles of all kinds, a murderer. She had been the sister of one of the crewmembers and for most of her life had wished for nothing but to take revenge on various family members. This too was unimportant now. A mechanic, a human man, white skinned, looking tired and old in the torn remains of insufficient clothing accompanied her, walking just behind her, his eyes cast low, as he did not bother to take in the broken wonders of the world surrounding him. He too had been a murderer once, believing in his right to use, if not deadly, at least highly destructive force to further the means he considered worth his time, another habit left behind. 

They sold the ship near the Supplement Markets at a bad price, thankful to have found a buyer, and made home in a small, ground level hole-in-the-wall shop a few streets further that opened into a maze of small storage rooms and living facilities, furnished and left uninhabited, after its previous tenant had been crushed by a suddenly driverless car near the end of the street and bleed out on the scene. It was located within an area that had once been one of the most frequented markets for machinery in this sector of the galaxy, a net of small, badly maintained corridors between high reaching buildings, where shops stood wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling, fifty-five stories high and eleven into the ground, their owners selling everything from weaponry to washing machines. Its streets had been bustling once and even through five of the seven main buildings had been destroyed in the fires raging after a ship had flown into a nearby electricity line and, in passing, enlightened several hundred kilos of unlawfully stored chemicals used for the production of spray paint, the remaining area was still filled with activity, even through the pulling and pushing that had once defined the foot traffic had long died down. Their funds where enough to purchase a small wagon, a second-hand vehicle that floated softly above the street, which, after being claimed by the owner cousin, the owner himselfe having disintegrated in Thanos moment of triumph, was cheap and almost new. They drove it into the ruins, leaving it floating between the broken down buildings while they searched the remains of former shops for leftover machinery and tools, doing their best to ignore the corpses that had been spared by the fires and left only partially buried or completely untouched.  
It was a grisly work.  
With hardly anyone left to fight the flames it had been the rain that put the fires out, leaving smouldering patches in the ashes, which had to be avoided unless one wished to burn. Even so they had to be afraid of infections when cutting themselves on the bared edges of building material, which, as medical treatment was still hard to come by, might have spelled out their end. The stink of the burnt and rotting flesh of the less lucky treasure hunters, mixing with the lingering smell of smoke and the thick layers of dirt covering everything made the ruins almost impossible to navigate.  
They spent weeks scavenging the ruins, not daring to enter the buildings hollow shells, instead keeping to the shops near the street, where other had been before them, or digging between steel and stone where walls had collapsed completely.  
When they returned to the shop every day their wagon was loaded high with whatever they could find, leaving the evenings spent washing and sorting the parts, mending what seemed of use, in the shallow hope that something valuable would be amongst them, through they where still undecided what to do with their remaining time.  
When they had gathered enough the mechanic suggested returning to give proper burials to the scorched corpses. The murderer refused. She said that there was not much sense in such belated actions. They could have saved them before the fires. They could have prevented them.  
So they moved one. There was a feeling of guilt between them, one neither of the two could quit understand. It was an emotion that would never quite leave them, overlaying all their actions like the foul smell of the ruins. Still, they where alive and, as the days passed, came to appreciate this fact as a grace not often granted in these days. 

It was not easy to push away the troughs of grandeur that had plagued the mechanic, but there was nothing left that could have reminded him of his days as a hero, husband or comrade in arms and little time for anything that was not the technology he worked to understand every day and which increasingly fascinated him, leaving him working until he had to strain his eyes to make out the shape of his current projects. When the murderer left their quarters at night, returning smelling of cheap, self-made booze, the stuff that burned his throat in the early mornings when he could not find sleep, returning with her hands covered in blood, jet another cause of death in a city filled with corpses, he tolerated her. Who where they to judge each other for self-destruction after all?  
The murderer found it harder to leave behind her thoughts of revenge, now that ‘revenge’ was the word whispered between the ruins, written unto the hulls of crashed ships, under which corpses still laid buried and their cockpits stained with ash, and screamed through the street. Relief she found in the oblivion if liquor, where many sought it, forming a community of drunkards stumbling towards the future. The violence came more natural and with it a new understanding of purpose. It was a time of opportunity, a good time for reinvention. 

 

“I don’t get it,” says the mechanic, who does not quite get many things, but hardly ever while standing in his own workshop.  
“It is something I am good at. It pays well,” the murderer answers. She is lying stretched out on his workbench, her right shoulder opened to reveal the mash of wires and circuits the mechanic is currently working to understand.  
“Not like I would throw you out if you don’t pay rent,” he responds, “By the way: You know Julius? – The Zenian guy living down the street. He asked me to fix the steering unit of his daughters ship yesterday. Gave me baby goat. Or at least something that looks a lot like a goat. You could tend the goat,” with a small screwdriver he pokes something deep inside her shoulder. “I will never quite understand why they put that here.”  
“It is pronounced J’Uhlus,” the murderer corrects, “And I know nothing about goats. What do they eat? And what do you mean put that there?”  
“It’s like someone misplaced half your brain in your shoulder. The basic stuff, how to breathe, walk, brain a man probably. It’s back up. Actually,” he explains, starring intently into her shoulder, “it’s not as much your brain as it is some kind of basic program, like Windows on a Computer?” He looks at her for a moment, as it dawns to him that this probably means very little to her. “Through more complex. There must be a few more in you, otherwise any semi-unlucky blow would just end you. Not that you would really die, I think most of your brain activity is stored somewhere, which I really need to look into, but,” he pauses, “Your body would be pretty much death. And Grass. Through I’m not sure if it really is a goat. There,” he finishes his investigation, disconnecting something inside of her that let her arm fall down lifeless, “Gotta look at that, give me a moment.”  
“What do you mean not a goat?” she presses out sharply, surprised by the sudden loss of control. She had not been aware that this was possible. He takes a small chip from what should have been hard muscles, a tiny, silver coloured disc that he holds towards the light to inspect the lines running across its otherwise blank surface.  
“Wait a moment,” he says distractedly, twisting it with the ends of his tweezers while holding his left hand below it, as if to shield it. “You know I have some problems with that floaty language they use. Its too…” he moves the tweezers in a vague half circle, flinching when he almost drops the chip. “…You know. Which is another reason to not throw you out. There must be a translator program somewhere in there.” The last part comes out jokingly, as he playfully bumps his hips against the bench, but she replies with a sound of discontent.  
“I know you need me. It is about what you said. The thing about business back when we found this shithole,” she replies, lifting her head from the bench to better watch him, as he stalks off to the next desk, still holding the chip like a treasure. His distracted behaviour calms her somewhat. “About there being markets and us needing to fill them?”  
He almost turns at that, the movement little more than a vague glace across a lifted shoulder, “Excuse me, Nebula, but I can not imagine there being a market for murder. As far as I’m aware the need for death has been filled beyond satisfaction,” he grins as if he told a joke, his eyes cold.  
She huffs unhappily, laying her head back down, where her cheek rests against the hard bench. These repairs are better, but she still hates them, “There is always a market for murder. And I can fill it.”  
“Even if, we have both proven that we are not capable of filling it. Who do you think those people want to see death?” he snaps, slapping his left hand down on the table. She flinches but does her best to hide the movement. He would not have seen it anyway.  
“You know, there is always someone in the way,” she says, “Killing is not just about revenge, or making the world a better place.” They both stiffen at her words, but while on other days the uncomfortable shuffling of his feet and her slow breathing, so slow that he sometimes fears she stopped already, would have filled the silence, now she presses on, “Sometimes it is just about opportunity.”  
“But you...” he starts, then pauses, forcing his hands to hold still, wondering when they started shaking. It is a good thing he already connected to chip to all the wires he needs to read it, “You kill for revenge, don’t you?”  
Something in her face twists. He would have noticed had he just looked.  
She lets him wait, starring at his back, as he relaxes back into his work, his mind taken off their conversation.  
“That is not important.” She states, finally.  
This makes him jump, makes him turn even. His eyes are blown wide again, “I do not know how you imagine this,” he begins, “Killing everyone, just so you dad will never live in that perfect world of his?”  
“Don’t call him that!” she snaps, her voice higher than normal.  
“I am sorry”, he retracts, sounding as ashamed as he should feel, in her opinion, as he turns back to his work, “I will be done soon.”  
They brood in silence for a bit, both considering what they have said, wondering what it would take to undo the conversation and this entire terrible day leading up to it.  
Nothing, the murderer decides, and doubles down, as the mechanic returns the chip into her shoulder. “I already have a gig,” she says and can feel him twitch within her body, his hands almost dislodging her from her position on the bench. Carefully she tries to move her fingers while he checks for damage.  
“Who?”  
“Guy named Gan Hio-Yuatirin,” she stumbles slightly over the last syllable, “No one to miss. Just somebody running unsavoury business where someone else wants to”  
“From criminal to criminal then.”  
She feels his hands run across her arms, before he takes hold, pushing her down, as he activates the mechanisms that close her body. She always hated this part, but he is kind about it, waiting for her nod before he fumbles behind her ear, pulling a little needle from her brain that had kept her sense of pain deactivated. Her shoulder burns like it has just been dislocated, accompanied by a sensation of unfathomable wrongness, the phantoms of his fingers twisting in her meat. She wants to throw up.  
A shooting hand runs down her back as she sits up. “Please don’t go.”  
Laughing bubbles in her chest and she is not sure if it is real, or just the sad barks she spat out as she learned how much he adored the ruins her father left her in. “Try stopping me.” She would have liked to frown, but she hardly manages to sit up, slumping into him when she tries to stand, her shoulder still arching painfully, which he pays mind to while he supports her. 

 

The deed is done within the week, which is of a different length than what they are used to, but not so significantly off that either would have commented. She returns to their home clutching two steaming bowls of noodles in her hands, her weapons and the money they don’t so desperately need that it would have explained her actions, hidden beneath her clothing. It is cold in this part of the world, something she had appreciated for secrecies sake until the moment that she needed to place a knife in a stomach covered by three layers of thick fabric. She can seen her breathe in the air, and the steam rising form the bowls, the heat slowly deforming the material and warming her fingertips, which have been freezing since she washed them, hating the sticky feeling of dried blood.  
She arrives to find the mechanic crouching beside the small confinement he build to prevent the definitively-not-a-goat, a reddish animal of moderate intelligence he named Steve and takes for walks around the shop whenever fancy strikes him, from disassembling what, with some lenience, could be called a living room. He is talking to it now, mumbling things she does not care about while running his hand down its back with some fascination, but flinches and stands up when she steps into his field of view. She decides to walk louder I his presence.  
“Exhausted?” he asks as she hands him one bowl, receiving a noncommittal hum in reply. The job was not hard, but it had left her feeling drained and tired.  
“More fun killing as a hobby?”  
She snorts and sits down, cradling the bowl in her hands, before she brings it to her mouth, shaking some of the food into her mouth and causing him to twist his mouth in displeasure.  
“Only Steve is allowed to do that.”  
She grins momentarily, “My food my rules.” She likes this phrase and while it is no longer worth thinking about where she first heard it just some months ago, it shuts him up just fine, which gives her some satisfaction. “And how was your day?”  
“Good enough.”  
It is after a minute of silence, she times it absentmindedly, that both move. Not towards each other, or another room, but towards the box where they found cutlery some days ago, through neither has quite figured out how to eat with it. She reaches it first, and hands him, standing a few steps behind her several items, all differently shaped and similarly mysterious, receiving a vague shrug as a thank you, more than enough to warn her.  
“I will do it again,” Nebula says showing past him and grabbing her bowl in passing.  
“Yes,” he would have interrupted her, had he spoken just a bid faster, “that’s what I want to talk about.”  
She glares at him.  
“There is nothing I can do to keep you from doing it, and I guess it is better if you at least know who you will kill before the night begins.” That is slightly incorrect, as her last victim died on a late morning, but she allows him to continue.  
“So I thought,” he continues, “I will help you.”  
“What?” He does not seem like a person who would cherish murder.  
“Not directly,” he shrugs, “but I rather know what you are doing, than find you death in the gutter some day.”  
She throws him a wittering look. They both know that she is far too difficult to kill for the gutter. Corpses like hers are awarded special treatment and should be found stuffed in a trophy hall or nailed onto her father’s door, gutted for parts and displayed with pride. It takes her a moment to notice the fallacy in her thinking; still she smiles at the thought of ruining something of her father’s in her death, possibly the carpet.  
“Ahm,” he coughs awkwardly, “Anyway. Unless you really want to die, which honestly, at this point I can’t blame you? – I could help with the planning?”  
“Sure.” She notices that she is still grinning and clumsily stuffs some noodles into her mouth.  
“Cool.”  
She looks at him for a moment, chewing slowly. “I don’t have anything particular lined up right now.”  
It earns her another shrug as he starts eating, slurping and splashing as he tries to wind the food around the cutlery.  
She assumes he does not mind. 

 

He does not, strictly speaking, help with her next job, instead insisting for it to be dragged out into endless session of planning and research she comes to see as an obstacle. Murder, she argues, is simpler than most assumes. It has no need for fancy techniques or plans, but merely needs a subject to be killed, and the infliction of grievous bodily harm to it, causing its body to cease functioning. An idiot could kill a man if given cause and opportunity.  
The trick, the replies, must be in not getting caught.  
She knows the trick but does not reply, as this too is wrong. If one wanted to truly be artful, she replies, one could think about not killing the subject at all.  
She decides against artfulness in the end, instead preferring the crude method of dropping a heavy instrument on her victims head, which breaks against the pavement and covers the street in pieces of brain and blood, effectively convincing her of the subjects death and a street sweeper of his need for a raise.  
She leans back into a room she knows too well thanks to and endless stream of schematic drawings, rubbing her pleasantly clean hands.  
“Killed by a comic cliché,” her accomplice laughs joylessly behind her, “who would have through someone could die by piano?”  
“It’s not a piano,” she tries to argue, not understanding how anyone would wish to survive that, “it produces different notes.” She had tried to show him earlier, attempted the few grips she could still remember on the loud, large and impressively heavy instrument. She hardly remembered trying to learn it and could not protest when he sat down besides her, butchering a short melody. 

It is their first in many semi-shared murders and they go from there, filling their days with busyness to their best abilities. They sleep little and at odd times while the city around them comes back to its metaphorical feet, hurrying to leave the past behind and struggling with the implications, leading them to almost ignore the appearance of a common enemy in their neighbourhood, until the man stands in their shop, demanding assistance and ineffectively wilding a knife towards anyone stepping to close.


End file.
